The Dumbing Down of the North American Education System

Yes, indeed! We have been robbed of knowing the passion for learning and of learning, itself!  If you read the text books (readers) of students even as late as the 1950s, you would see how incredibly lax the standards are in the late part of that century and the beginning of this one.  Instead of real, important issues and topics and information being taught, it's now propaganda, socialization, socializing, and tiny bit of learning,
This may seem a skeptical and grim opinion, however, it is based on my own experience in the system and on many years of reading reports, watching specials and many discussions. 

One issue that I saw as an important issue was the removal of The Arts as actual subjects taught in school.  I'm not sure about historical schooling systems because, quite honestly, I haven't researched that to date, but I doubt, in the early twentieth century North American school taught any arts as complete subjects (although maybe they taught a bit depending on how much the particular teacher knew). When I was in my last year of high school  (1998) I took co-op education. I had a placement as a Music Teacher's assistant. She was also the Computer teacher.  Half way through the year, there was a mold that was growing in some of the portables (something fairly common in Ontario in the late 1990s) so a few of the classes had to move into the classrooms inside the schools.  This caused us to lose the Music room and Music started to be phased out of the school's program.  This type of situation was a common occurrence across the Toronto area, and maybe even Ontario and Canada. Over the next few  years, Music was almost completely knocked out of public school in the area.

  I started working in a program, teaching piano, inside of the Dufferin/Peel Catholic School Board  in 2002. By then in the school I was working in, there was basically no music, very little art, if any, not much English(spelling, grammar) or Language Arts programs past the grade 3 level.  Now, I realize that a lot of people (especially politicians) don't believe that Music or other Arts are important topics to teach in school, but many studies have demonstrated otherwise.  I'm not going to get off on another rant about that issue though.  My point is, school, even in the 4 years that passed between my graduating and going back to being able to see what was going on in the school system, things had changed quite a bit.

I'm sure it had changed a lot over the previous years also but that's hard to see when you're inside it and also don't have perspective away from it.  Not only had a lot of subjects been shunned, but children were also treated a lot differently.  They were not, it seemed, required to behave with respect or order. I'm sure they thought they were, and the teachers thought they were, but if you had showed someone who was a teacher in the 1940s, how kids and teachers behaved, they would see a complete lack of respect on both parts. That is my opinion of what I witnessed (this is generalization, of course).

But also, students were not really taught a lesson in class. Not the way I was when I was a student. They were taught maybe a 10 or 20 minute lesson, or given a note to copy down and maybe a brief discussion on the topic, and then given hours of homework to complete.  Of course, this is not all the fault of the teachers.  Teachers were given oodles of paperwork to do, probably a lot of it administrative.  They also, most of them, had 2 or 3 other classes to teach on rotation.  So they had to have time to plan that.  So giving the class a note quickly and then "work time" was some of the small amount of time that they had to plan other classes or mark tests/quizzes/assignments.  Not only is this approach useless, but also the quality of what is being taught is continually decreasing.  It's also infiltrated with tons of unnecessary information and propaganda. Also the students have many interruptions in the year.

As Stefan mentions in the included video, summer vacation isn't really needed anymore (maybe give a couple of weeks like a small summer break) and there are tons of "Professional Developement" Days and school trips and largely meaningless assemblies. The students are in school for maybe a grand total of 6 months of real class time. This is a rough estimation.

  And on top of all this, a large number of teachers, especially at the middle school and high school levels, have had the love for educating sucked out of them by years of education themselves. Only the resilient and determined teachers who have passion for educating the next generation get through that and can still make a valuable impact on their students' lives.

My opinion on homework is that it should be minimally used as review time for subjects like Arithmetic and Spelling/Grammar and maybe weekly homework in Science, History or Languages.  Perhaps a couple of times a year they should have a large assignment or speech writing or science exhibit to work on and for older kids, yearly or by-yearly exams.   Kids are so overwhelmed with hours of daily homework from many different classes, large assignments, projects, exams, constant expectations of studying and keeping up grades that they drown.  They also are usually put in a bunch of extra-curricular or join school clubs and/or teams which add to the workload. Then they go home and have hours of homework to catch up on.  How about letting kids be kids. Teach them a real lesson during class time with simple explanations of the concepts with a small exercise sheet for homework, which would take them, at most, twenty minutes to finish, and then letting them be free.   We would have a much happier society if we functioned this way. 

There are a bunch of other issues on this topic I could refer to but I think I will save that for another time! :)